Kim Philby was widely respected, yet, like others, he betrayed his country. Researching a thriller on the British secret service led William Boyd to ask how such a privileged Englishman could become such a successful Soviet agent

Saturday September 23, 2006The Guardian

"Very limited intelligence ... by and large pretty stupid, some of them very stupid." Such was a new recruit's opinion of his colleagues in the British secret service at the beginning of the second world war. He went on, unsparingly: "There were the metropolitan young gentlemen whose education had been expensive rather than profound and who were recruited at the bars of White's and Boodles, and there were the ex-Indian policemen ... Neither class had much use for ideas. The former had seldom heard of them; the latter regarded them as subversive."

I spent many months last year researching the British secret service for my novel Restless - the story of a young woman working in the lower echelons of the British espionage business - and I found this dry and acerbic analysis particularly helpful and revealing. Not least because this was the organisation that had admitted into its ranks at least five double agents for the Soviet Union: Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, John Cairncross, Anthony Blunt and the "super spy" Kim Philby, whose near-effortless rise through the secret-service hierarchy resulted in him being groomed, postwar, for the ultimate top job - that of "C" itself. It would have been an unrivalled coup for Moscow to have their man running the British secret services. And it very nearly came off.

In the course of writing the novel I became very curious about this covey of British double agents and what united them, apart from their betrayal of their country. All were middle class or upper-middle class, all well educated with solid professional careers in the great institutions of the state. They were members of "the establishment" in every degree - their background, their ostensible values, their speech, their clubs, their dress, their pastimes and pleasures. There was nothing on the surface to distinguish them from the thousands of other privileged, Oxbridge-educated young men working in the Foreign Office or the diplomatic service or the BBC. Yet each chose to become a traitor.

One can understand how in the 1930s, when these agents were first recruited by the Soviets, the ideological appeal of communism presented the only real alternative to the seemingly inexorable rise of fascism in Europe. Yet the more I looked at these men and read about their double lives, considered their fallibilities and their anxieties (Burgess and Maclean in particular), their luck and their unremarked incompetence (Philby excepted) - I began to feel that ideological zeal simply couldn't explain their many years of successful and fatal duplicity. There had to be some other motivation other than the allure of communism - especially after the devastating shock of the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939. Once Stalin and Hitler became allies, only the most perverse reasoning could maintain that there was one true enemy of fascism and that it was Soviet Russia. The tortuous double-think of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) is both revealing and risible in this regard. The Daily Worker, the party's newspaper, had been virulently pacifist and anti-Nazi, but after the 1939 pact all criticism of Hitler virtually ceased in the paper. Then, when Hitler invaded Russia in June 1941, the CPGB became virulently anti-Nazi again. No person of intelligence could take such policy about-turns seriously.

Furthermore, these British traitors both lived in and flourished in a democratic society, each one benefiting from the privileges offered to its educated elite. They were not hounded or embittered, nor victims of repression or state corruption, nor thwarted in ambition, blocked at every turn - so why did they become traitors?

The case of Kim Philby is perhaps the most interesting. Philby was a man universally liked, a highly respected professional - competent and industrious, decorated after the war - and a charming and amusing companion. His wife regarded him as a "divine husband" and classed their marriage as "perfect". He existed at the highest levels of the secret service for 10 years, between 1941 and 1951, without attracting the slightest suspicion. Hugh Trevor-Roper (the author of the caustic judgment on his colleagues above) knew Philby during the war and described him as "an exceptional person: exceptional by his virtues, for he seemed intelligent, sophisticated, even real".

In 1951, after the flight of Burgess and Maclean to Moscow, Philby was obliged to resign from the service, to the regret of his colleagues, because of his close association with Burgess, a friendship that he refused to disown. Even this was regarded as a symbol of his fundamental decency and good fellowship. It was not held against him and he was reintroduced to the service after some years in a minor role (in Beirut) before eventually fleeing to Moscow in 1963 - possibly because a Soviet defector was about to reveal his identity.

No one really knows how many deaths and imprisonments Philby was responsible for. The number is probably in the hundreds. For example, British agents and couriers sent to Albania and Ukraine to foment anti-communist revolution after the war were routinely intercepted and executed thanks to Philby's advance warnings. In Washington in the late 1940s he passed on all secret material that crossed his desk to the Russians - most usefully analysis of America's nuclear capability. One can argue that Philby's information was instrumental in the prosecuting of the Korean war and the Cuban missile crisis. He was an extremely effective and important double agent.

Trevor-Roper was clearly baffled (as baffled as I was) when he came to consider Philby's character and to try to come to terms with the fact that his former friend was a traitor. He wrote a series of articles in the 1960s, after Philby's flight and resurfacing in Moscow, analysing the affair. How could someone like Philby have been such a successful traitor? How had everybody trusted him all these years? How could he be so loyal to a brutal and disgusting tyrannical state - Stalin's Russia? Seeking answers, Trevor-Roper eventually came up with the somewhat high-flown thesis that communism had created in Philby a form of "death of the mind", that he "had drunk from the drugged chalice of that secret church". I just don't buy this, not least because Philby was not alone. Are we to assume that the other four British traitors had also sipped at this "drugged chalice" and had undergone this "death of the mind"? Perhaps one might - just - but surely not all five. I think the answers to this particularly British state of affairs lie elsewhere.

Seeking explanation, I created in my novel a Philby-style traitor, but one who is never exposed as Philby was, and in so doing I had to consider the reasons why a character so favoured by fortune in his native country should strive so diligently to betray it. There are, it seems to me, two plausible reasons that explain the behaviour of these British traitors and Philby in particular. The first can be summed up as "once a spy, always a spy". Even if ideological zeal takes you into the double-agent profession it is very difficult, once that zeal dies, or is replaced by clearer, more pragmatic vision, to get out of it. Not only is it a question of potential exposure (it's very hard to resign as a traitor) but it becomes, in other words, a habit of mind, a double life that seems an almost natural one to lead.

This explains someone like Anthony Blunt - perhaps the least lethal of the Cambridge spies, but the one who rose to a position of extraordinary eminence in public life that is almost incredible: keeper of the queen's pictures, a knighthood, head of the Courtauld Institute, an internationally recognised art authority and collector and a world expert on Poussin. Trying to comprehend the level of Blunt's self-knowledge as he accepted these successive honours is almost impossible. It reveals something almost freakish about him: this is a man who took enormous pains to betray his country, yet he was prepared to accept every honour it would bestow on him. Blunt's case, in retrospect, is almost surreal. With Philby, there seemed some more subtle and corrupting rationale at work.

There are many reasons why people betray their country. One is revenge, and a subcategory or corollary of revenge is "hate". Wilful betrayal of your country implies some sort of hatred of your country, and in the example of Blunt we have an insight into Philby's extraordinary career and personality.

I realise that we now enter the area of informed speculation, but Trevor-Roper gave another, inadvertent clue when he referred to Philby's "unquestioning, all-absorbing egotism which guided him in all his actions". Here is an explanation that holds more water than the "death of the mind". Philby's betrayal becomes more plausible and comprehensible if one regards it as a form of sweet and pure egomania. The fact that he was being groomed to become head of the secret service just adds extra gloss to the nature of that betrayal. Philby was outsmarting and had outsmarted everybody: it was the very nature of his continued success, the respect he engendered and the overt devotion and admiration of his colleagues that fuelled and drove his double life. I would argue that it had nothing to do with idealism at all.

But there is still one further impulse that, I believe, explains the collective betrayals of these privileged, intelligent men. Britain in the 1930s was both rich and globally powerful. These five double agents found themselves members of its favoured classes at the heart of the English elite, at the very centre of establishment supremacy and influence. As these men looked around them, what did they see? Did they like what they saw? Did they like what they were? The writer Frederic Raphael has observed that "When Britain was rich and powerful, a man might believe himself devoted to either forwarding or altering her purposes." My hunch is that the five Cambridge spies all decided to take the latter course.

Philby himself alluded obliquely to this when he was interviewed by a British newspaper after his defection to Moscow in 1963. He said he regarded himself as "wholly and irreversibly English and England as having been perhaps the most fertile patch of earth in the whole history of human ideas". Asked why he then betrayed this wonderful country, he said that he held a "humane contempt" for "certain temporary phenomena that prevented England from being herself".

This is the crucial admission explaining Philby's treason and, moreover, the casual use of "England" and "English" is very revealing - the unreflecting language of the establishment. Here is the clue to the swagger and sheer aplomb of Philby's sustained and astonishingly successful betrayal. He calls it "humane contempt", but I think "contempt" will do nicely. With his impregnable self-assurance, the egomaniac contemplates the rich and sacrosanct world he's been born into (let us recall Trevor-Roper's own harsh judgment of his peers and superiors) and finds he has nothing but contempt for it. In such circumstances, sometimes it is just as easy to hate your country as it is to love it.

What is a man like Kim Philby to do in such a situation, as he looks around him and senses his contempt burgeoning? What options exist? Exploitation, denial, resignation, some form of flight - or betrayal? Philby and his fellow privileged traitors made their choice.

Kim Philby was widely respected, yet, like others, he betrayed his country. Researching a thriller on the British secret service led William Boyd to ask how such a privileged Englishman could become such a successful Soviet agent

Saturday September 23, 2006The Guardian

"Very limited intelligence ... by and large pretty stupid, some of them very stupid." Such was a new recruit's opinion of his colleagues in the British secret service at the beginning of the second world war. He went on, unsparingly: "There were the metropolitan young gentlemen whose education had been expensive rather than profound and who were recruited at the bars of White's and Boodles, and there were the ex-Indian policemen ... Neither class had much use for ideas. The former had seldom heard of them; the latter regarded them as subversive."

I spent many months last year researching the British secret service for my novel Restless - the story of a young woman working in the lower echelons of the British espionage business - and I found this dry and acerbic analysis particularly helpful and revealing. Not least because this was the organisation that had admitted into its ranks at least five double agents for the Soviet Union: Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, John Cairncross, Anthony Blunt and the "super spy" Kim Philby, whose near-effortless rise through the secret-service hierarchy resulted in him being groomed, postwar, for the ultimate top job - that of "C" itself. It would have been an unrivalled coup for Moscow to have their man running the British secret services. And it very nearly came off.

In the course of writing the novel I became very curious about this covey of British double agents and what united them, apart from their betrayal of their country. All were middle class or upper-middle class, all well educated with solid professional careers in the great institutions of the state. They were members of "the establishment" in every degree - their background, their ostensible values, their speech, their clubs, their dress, their pastimes and pleasures. There was nothing on the surface to distinguish them from the thousands of other privileged, Oxbridge-educated young men working in the Foreign Office or the diplomatic service or the BBC. Yet each chose to become a traitor.

One can understand how in the 1930s, when these agents were first recruited by the Soviets, the ideological appeal of communism presented the only real alternative to the seemingly inexorable rise of fascism in Europe. Yet the more I looked at these men and read about their double lives, considered their fallibilities and their anxieties (Burgess and Maclean in particular), their luck and their unremarked incompetence (Philby excepted) - I began to feel that ideological zeal simply couldn't explain their many years of successful and fatal duplicity. There had to be some other motivation other than the allure of communism - especially after the devastating shock of the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939. Once Stalin and Hitler became allies, only the most perverse reasoning could maintain that there was one true enemy of fascism and that it was Soviet Russia. The tortuous double-think of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) is both revealing and risible in this regard. The Daily Worker, the party's newspaper, had been virulently pacifist and anti-Nazi, but after the 1939 pact all criticism of Hitler virtually ceased in the paper. Then, when Hitler invaded Russia in June 1941, the CPGB became virulently anti-Nazi again. No person of intelligence could take such policy about-turns seriously.

Furthermore, these British traitors both lived in and flourished in a democratic society, each one benefiting from the privileges offered to its educated elite. They were not hounded or embittered, nor victims of repression or state corruption, nor thwarted in ambition, blocked at every turn - so why did they become traitors?

The case of Kim Philby is perhaps the most interesting. Philby was a man universally liked, a highly respected professional - competent and industrious, decorated after the war - and a charming and amusing companion. His wife regarded him as a "divine husband" and classed their marriage as "perfect". He existed at the highest levels of the secret service for 10 years, between 1941 and 1951, without attracting the slightest suspicion. Hugh Trevor-Roper (the author of the caustic judgment on his colleagues above) knew Philby during the war and described him as "an exceptional person: exceptional by his virtues, for he seemed intelligent, sophisticated, even real".

In 1951, after the flight of Burgess and Maclean to Moscow, Philby was obliged to resign from the service, to the regret of his colleagues, because of his close association with Burgess, a friendship that he refused to disown. Even this was regarded as a symbol of his fundamental decency and good fellowship. It was not held against him and he was reintroduced to the service after some years in a minor role (in Beirut) before eventually fleeing to Moscow in 1963 - possibly because a Soviet defector was about to reveal his identity.

No one really knows how many deaths and imprisonments Philby was responsible for. The number is probably in the hundreds. For example, British agents and couriers sent to Albania and Ukraine to foment anti-communist revolution after the war were routinely intercepted and executed thanks to Philby's advance warnings. In Washington in the late 1940s he passed on all secret material that crossed his desk to the Russians - most usefully analysis of America's nuclear capability. One can argue that Philby's information was instrumental in the prosecuting of the Korean war and the Cuban missile crisis. He was an extremely effective and important double agent.

Trevor-Roper was clearly baffled (as baffled as I was) when he came to consider Philby's character and to try to come to terms with the fact that his former friend was a traitor. He wrote a series of articles in the 1960s, after Philby's flight and resurfacing in Moscow, analysing the affair. How could someone like Philby have been such a successful traitor? How had everybody trusted him all these years? How could he be so loyal to a brutal and disgusting tyrannical state - Stalin's Russia? Seeking answers, Trevor-Roper eventually came up with the somewhat high-flown thesis that communism had created in Philby a form of "death of the mind", that he "had drunk from the drugged chalice of that secret church". I just don't buy this, not least because Philby was not alone. Are we to assume that the other four British traitors had also sipped at this "drugged chalice" and had undergone this "death of the mind"? Perhaps one might - just - but surely not all five. I think the answers to this particularly British state of affairs lie elsewhere.

Seeking explanation, I created in my novel a Philby-style traitor, but one who is never exposed as Philby was, and in so doing I had to consider the reasons why a character so favoured by fortune in his native country should strive so diligently to betray it. There are, it seems to me, two plausible reasons that explain the behaviour of these British traitors and Philby in particular. The first can be summed up as "once a spy, always a spy". Even if ideological zeal takes you into the double-agent profession it is very difficult, once that zeal dies, or is replaced by clearer, more pragmatic vision, to get out of it. Not only is it a question of potential exposure (it's very hard to resign as a traitor) but it becomes, in other words, a habit of mind, a double life that seems an almost natural one to lead.

This explains someone like Anthony Blunt - perhaps the least lethal of the Cambridge spies, but the one who rose to a position of extraordinary eminence in public life that is almost incredible: keeper of the queen's pictures, a knighthood, head of the Courtauld Institute, an internationally recognised art authority and collector and a world expert on Poussin. Trying to comprehend the level of Blunt's self-knowledge as he accepted these successive honours is almost impossible. It reveals something almost freakish about him: this is a man who took enormous pains to betray his country, yet he was prepared to accept every honour it would bestow on him. Blunt's case, in retrospect, is almost surreal. With Philby, there seemed some more subtle and corrupting rationale at work.

There are many reasons why people betray their country. One is revenge, and a subcategory or corollary of revenge is "hate". Wilful betrayal of your country implies some sort of hatred of your country, and in the example of Blunt we have an insight into Philby's extraordinary career and personality.

I realise that we now enter the area of informed speculation, but Trevor-Roper gave another, inadvertent clue when he referred to Philby's "unquestioning, all-absorbing egotism which guided him in all his actions". Here is an explanation that holds more water than the "death of the mind". Philby's betrayal becomes more plausible and comprehensible if one regards it as a form of sweet and pure egomania. The fact that he was being groomed to become head of the secret service just adds extra gloss to the nature of that betrayal. Philby was outsmarting and had outsmarted everybody: it was the very nature of his continued success, the respect he engendered and the overt devotion and admiration of his colleagues that fuelled and drove his double life. I would argue that it had nothing to do with idealism at all.

But there is still one further impulse that, I believe, explains the collective betrayals of these privileged, intelligent men. Britain in the 1930s was both rich and globally powerful. These five double agents found themselves members of its favoured classes at the heart of the English elite, at the very centre of establishment supremacy and influence. As these men looked around them, what did they see? Did they like what they saw? Did they like what they were? The writer Frederic Raphael has observed that "When Britain was rich and powerful, a man might believe himself devoted to either forwarding or altering her purposes." My hunch is that the five Cambridge spies all decided to take the latter course.

Philby himself alluded obliquely to this when he was interviewed by a British newspaper after his defection to Moscow in 1963. He said he regarded himself as "wholly and irreversibly English and England as having been perhaps the most fertile patch of earth in the whole history of human ideas". Asked why he then betrayed this wonderful country, he said that he held a "humane contempt" for "certain temporary phenomena that prevented England from being herself".

This is the crucial admission explaining Philby's treason and, moreover, the casual use of "England" and "English" is very revealing - the unreflecting language of the establishment. Here is the clue to the swagger and sheer aplomb of Philby's sustained and astonishingly successful betrayal. He calls it "humane contempt", but I think "contempt" will do nicely. With his impregnable self-assurance, the egomaniac contemplates the rich and sacrosanct world he's been born into (let us recall Trevor-Roper's own harsh judgment of his peers and superiors) and finds he has nothing but contempt for it. In such circumstances, sometimes it is just as easy to hate your country as it is to love it.

What is a man like Kim Philby to do in such a situation, as he looks around him and senses his contempt burgeoning? What options exist? Exploitation, denial, resignation, some form of flight - or betrayal? Philby and his fellow privileged traitors made their choice.

CAMBRIDGE, England — After keeping it sealed in a steel container for 25 years, the British Library made public on Thursday a 30,000-word memoir in which Anthony Blunt, one of Britain’s most renowned 20th-century art historians, described spying for the Soviet Union, beginning in the mid-1930s, as “the biggest mistake of my life.”

Related Times Topics: Espionage

The memoir offers few new insights into the details of Blunt’s spying, about which he said little in public before he died in 1983. Its main interest, according to historians, lies in Blunt’s account of his recruitment by another Soviet spy, Guy Burgess, when both were at Cambridge University in the 1930s, and in his exposition of his motives and feelings, including his disillusionment with Marxism and the Soviet Union after World War II.

The memoir, intended by Blunt as a testament to family and friends, was given to the library in 1984 by the executor of Blunt’s will, John Golding, on the condition that it be kept secret for 25 years. Frances Harris, the library’s head of modern historic manuscripts, told the BBC on Thursday that its existence was so closely guarded that even she had not read it until recently.

The memoir’s tone of regret for the price Blunt paid personally for betraying his country, coupled with the absence of any apology to those who suffered as a result of his actions, including secret agents working for Britain whose identities he passed to the Russians during World War II, contributed to harsh criticism of the document on Thursday from British historians and commentators.

In interviews before his death at the age of 75, Blunt rejected suggestions that he apologize to those he had betrayed, saying, in effect, that his personal sense of morality placed loyalty to his friends, including fellow spies, ahead of all else, including the love he said he felt in later life for Britain and its way of life.

After British intelligence agencies unmasked Blunt in the mid-1960s as the “fourth man” in a Soviet spy ring that included Mr. Burgess, Donald Maclean and H. A. R. Philby, who was known as Kim, he was granted immunity from prosecution — and, for 15 years, an understanding that his treachery not be publicly exposed — in return for cooperating with British intelligence. He lost his cover in 1979 when he was publicly exposed as a spy by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Describing his recruitment to the NKVD, a predecessor of the KGB, when Blunt was a tutor and Burgess was a student at Trinity College in 1935 and 1936, Blunt said in the memoir that Cambridge at the time was rife with Marxist sympathizers. “Faced with the advent to power of Hitler and later by the Spanish Civil War,” he said, he realized that “the ivory tower no longer provided adequate refuge.”

He describes coming under intense pressure from Burgess — depicted in histories of the period as a heavy-drinking, show-stealing egoist but in the memoir as “an extraordinarily persuasive person” — to join him in working for Soviet intelligence. “The atmosphere in Cambridge was so intense, the enthusiasm for any anti-fascist activity was so great, that I made the biggest mistake of my life,” he wrote.

The memoir also discloses that Blunt contemplated suicide when he learned in the 1970s that he might have been exposed. Mrs. Thatcher’s statement on his spying caused him to be dismissed from his job as Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures — curator of the royal art collection — and stripped of the knighthood conferred on him for his service to the monarchy. He was best known among art scholars as an expert on the French 17th-century classical painter Nicolas Poussin.

But even in his discussion of suicide, those who have read the memoir said, Blunt appears to have thought first of himself, and of his friends and family, and not of the people he had betrayed. “Many people will say that it would have been the ‘honorable way out,’ ” he wrote. But he said he had decided that suicide was “a cowardly solution,” because it would leave those close to him to deal with his exposure as a spy, and with their sense of loss at his death.

Also, he said, he wished to finish his work on a number of art history projects.

The memoir describes how Blunt’s political convictions changed after World War II, when, as an agent for MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence service, he relayed the names of British agents to his Soviet controllers. But even then, he said, he could not bring himself to break free of his Soviet masters because of his loyalty to other British spies, including Burgess and Maclean, who, as a Washington-based diplomat, had been involved in the 1940s and early 1950s in passing the West’s atomic secrets to Moscow.

“In fact, I was disillusioned about Marxism, as well as about Russia,” Blunt wrote. “What I personally hoped was to hear no more from my Russian friends, and to return to my normal academic life. Of course, it was not as simple as that, because there remained the fact that I knew of the continuing activities of Guy, Donald and Kim.” All three men eventually defected to the Soviet Union, setting off the chain of events that led to Blunt’s being exposed.

Christopher Andrew, a Cambridge historian specializing in intelligence matters, said the memoir reflected Blunt’s unwillingness to acknowledge the evil he had served in spying for Stalin. “The thing that he could never come to terms with afterwards was that, actually, he had entered the service of one of the most wicked men in Europe’s history,” Dr. Andrew told the BBC. “He simply describes it as a ‘mistake.’ ”

“He looked like he was right out of central casting,” said Dick Jones of the Penn State University public information department, pulling the 1963 photo out of his files.

“Need a spy, this would be Hollywood’s guy…a David Niven without a mustache.”

Then he was Sir Anthony Blunt, 56, recognized as one of the world’s foremost art historians, and Penn State was announcing his appointment as a distinguished visiting professor of art and architectural history for the summer term of 1963 at University Park.

Today, stripped of his knighthood, Anthony Blunt, 72, is still a renowned art historian but also the center of an international espionage controversy.

Blunt spent 10 weeks at Penn State in the summer of ’63 teaching graduate students and juniors and seniors a course in the problems of art history with special emphasis on 17th century French art and civilization.

Just one year later, according to Mrs. Thatcher, he was to confess that he had passed information to the Soviets during World War II.

Most, if not all, of the people who got to know Sir Anthony during his 10-week stay at Penn State are gone. But he was one of the first to be named as a distinguished visiting professor in a program that was initiated in 1958.

Now, in retrospect, knowing he was a Soviet spy in the Cambridge spy ring, which included Kim Philby, Donald McLean, Guy Burgess and probably one or two others, you would think that those responsible for US counter-intelligence would run a trace on Blunt's activities while he was in the United States.

After all, when they suspected McLean, and he lead to Burgess and Philby, it was quite clear that they had knowledge of many US intelligence operations, and Philby had most certainly betrayed the fact that funding for CIA covert operations were funneled through non-profit philantrophic foundations. Even though those operations were known to be blown by Philby, they continued for decades.

If they would have traced Blunt's activities in the USA they would have noted his 10 week visit to the obscure world of Beaver Valley, Pennsylvania, the out of the way home to Penn State University, best known for its football team, but not its art department.

Ah, yes, the summer of '63, what a lovely season it was indeed. JFK was president, Oswald was in New Orleans, and the Cubans were hot to trot to get back home. Or were they?

One Cuban refugee, Dr. Julio Fernandez, got a job teaching Spanish at a high school in Martinsburg, Pa., not far from Beaver Valley, and would later be investigated as a suspect in the assassination of President Kennedy.

His son, Julio Fernandez, Jr., was a teenage art student at Penn State, and may have been one of the students who took classes with Sir Anthony Blunt when he taught there that summer.

Were the Cuban refugee and the Soviet double agent together that summer?

“He looked like he was right out of central casting,” said Dick Jones of the Penn State University public information department, pulling the 1963 photo out of his files.

“Need a spy, this would be Hollywood’s guy…a David Niven without a mustache.”

Then he was Sir Anthony Blunt, 56, recognized as one of the world’s foremost art historians, and Penn State was announcing his appointment as a distinguished visiting professor of art and architectural history for the summer term of 1963 at University Park.

Today, stripped of his knighthood, Anthony Blunt, 72, is still a renowned art historian but also the center of an international espionage controversy.

Blunt spent 10 weeks at Penn State in the summer of ’63 teaching graduate students and juniors and seniors a course in the problems of art history with special emphasis on 17th century French art and civilization.

Just one year later, according to Mrs. Thatcher, he was to confess that he had passed information to the Soviets during World War II.

Most, if not all, of the people who got to know Sir Anthony during his 10-week stay at Penn State are gone. But he was one of the first to be named as a distinguished visiting professor in a program that was initiated in 1958.

Now, in retrospect, knowing he was a Soviet spy in the Cambridge spy ring, which included Kim Philby, Donald McLean, Guy Burgess and probably one or two others, you would think that those responsible for US counter-intelligence would run a trace on Blunt's activities while he was in the United States.

After all, when they suspected McLean, and he lead to Burgess and Philby, it was quite clear that they had knowledge of many US intelligence operations, and Philby had most certainly betrayed the fact that funding for CIA covert operations were funneled through non-profit philantrophic foundations. Even though those operations were known to be blown by Philby, they continued for decades.

If they would have traced Blunt's activities in the USA they would have noted his 10 week visit to the obscure world of Beaver Valley, Pennsylvania, the out of the way home to Penn State University, best known for its football team, but not its art department.

Ah, yes, the summer of '63, what a lovely season it was indeed. JFK was president, Oswald was in New Orleans, and the Cubans were hot to trot to get back home. Or were they?

One Cuban refugee, Dr. Julio Fernandez, got a job teaching Spanish at a high school in Martinsburg, Pa., not far from Beaver Valley, and would later be investigated as a suspect in the assassination of President Kennedy.

His son, Julio Fernandez, Jr., was a teenage art student at Penn State, and may have been one of the students who took classes with Sir Anthony Blunt when he taught there that summer.

Were the Cuban refugee and the Soviet double agent together that summer?

BK

If Anthony Blunt was still working for the Soviets when he went to Penn State University in the summer of '65, I speculated that he while there he met Julio Fernandez, Jr., and art major at that school, and active in anti-Castro activities.

Now however, it appears that rather than the Cuban, if Blunt was still working for the Soviets, the President of Penn State, Dr. Eric A. Walker was a much more formitable target, as the head of the Underwater Sound Lab at Harvard, which Walker relocated to land locked Penn State, as well as the Advanced Projects Research Agency, which isn't mentioned in his wicki bio. Walker became president following the reign of Milton S. Eisenhower, the President's brother.

Born in England in 1910, Walker grew up in York County, Pennsylvania. He considered enrolling at Penn State, but chose Harvard when it made a more attractive scholarship offer. He ultimately earned undergraduate and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering at Harvard University, before coming to Penn State in 1945 as director of Ordnance Research Laboratory. At the ORL, he oversaw pioneering research in underwater acoustics in cooperation with the U.S. Navy and also served as head of the University’s electrical engineering department. He became dean of engineering in 1951.

During World War II, Walker was associate director of the Underwater Sound Laboratory, initially located at Harvard, but relocated to the campus of Penn State University. Dr. Walker remained at Penn State, becoming head of the Department of Electrical Engineering, then Dean of the College of Engineering and Architecture in 1951. Next Dr. Walker became vice president for research at Penn State in 1956, and President of the University, also in 1956[2].

"We will soon spend millions to probe the atmosphere of Venus and Mars, while here on earth it remains polluted with dust and heat with which we cannot cope. Indeed it may be a good thing that ships from another planet are not sampling our atmosphere - the conclusion might be that life cannot possibly exist on earth."

During World War II, the Navy mobilized scientists and engineers from universities nationwide to join the war effort, and one group was located at Harvard’s Underwater Sound Laboratory. These acoustics experts made major advances in wartime sonar systems for detecting German U-boats and acoustically-guided homing torpedoes to sink them.

With the end of the conflict, many of the organizations that were mobilized for the war effort returned to their civilian work. The Navy, however, was determined to continue its wartime joint ventures with Harvard and other universities. When the director of the Harvard research team, Dr. Eric Walker, left for a position at Pennsylvania State University, the Navy asked him to continue his undersea warfare research on its behalf, a partnership that continues to this day at Penn State’s Applied Research Laboratory (ARL)....

Then there's the report regarding Guy Persac Johnson, Guy Bannister's ONI friend who Jack Martin and David Lewis claim had a secret Senate Judiciary report they called the "Homme Report" after its author, H. G. Homme, investigator for the Senate Judiciary Committee (Eastland). This report is said to contain the evidence that implicates RFK in "taking a contract out" on Castro.

This document also mentions an article published in the Houstonian, Feb. 20, 1968, that is the source for information about Guy P. Johnson.

Then it turns out that Jack Martin and David Lewis are the authors of the article, and in fact Martin had been an "unpaid correspondent" for the Houstonian in Nov. 65.

In this article, published in 1968, Martin and Lewis (Dean & Jerry) collaborate, though I don't know how much Lewis could contribute since he was uneducated. It is reported however, that he also saw the "Homme Report."

In it they contend that Kim Philby was somehow behind the Kennedy assassination, setting everything into motion before defecting to USSR.

Peter Wright, a former member of MI5, and the author of Spycatcher (1987) has argued that in the early 1950s he began investigating the possibility that Dick Ellis had been a Soviet spy. Wright became convinced that he had been working with Kim Philby. "Within a year of Philby's falling under suspicion Ellis took early retirement, pleading ill-health. He traveled to Australia, and took up a job as a consultant to ASIS, the Australian overseas intelligence-gathering organization. While there he was briefed by the Australians on the impending defection of Vladimir Petrov, a Beria henchman who opted to stay in the West rather than take his chances in Moscow. Almost immediately Ellis returned to Britain and contacted Kim Philby, despite being specifically warned against doing so by Maurice Oldfield... The reasons for Ellis' hasty flight from Australia have never been clear, but I have always been assumed that he thought that Petrov who was about to defect was the same Von Petrov with whom he had been involved in the 1920s, and who must have known the secret of his treachery."

In his book Peter Wright claims that Ellis confessed to his spying but Maurice Oldfield refused to take action against him. James Dalrymple has claimed that Ellis sold "vast quantities of information" about the British secret service to the Germans. However, his biographer, Frank Cain, has argued that Ellis was not guilty of spying: "Experts have dismissed these claims, if only because important information held by Ellis was known not to have been transmitted to the Soviet Union."